8220;Beautiful writing . . . Riveting [and] often funny.” –*Philadelphia Inquirer

*“Jones writes with pungent observation and wit.... She is an engaging and venturesome traveling companion, one whose encounters with Africans are touching and surprising.” –*The New York Times

“[An] entertaining and enlightening book.”–*St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Jones provides wonderful snapshots of Africa’s history. . . . An exceptionally interesting book.” –Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

Autorentext
Ann Jones received an M.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. Her travel essays and photographs have appeared in many newspapers and magazines, among them The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Town & Country, Women's Sports & Fitness, Outside, National Geographic Traveler, and Spur. She is the author of five other books. Ann Jones lives in New York's Hudson River Valley.

Klappentext

The adventure began when a young British photographer, Kevin Muggleton, suggested driving from one end of Africa to the other-"You know, the old 'Cape to Cairo' sort of thing.” For the renowned feminist writer Ann Jones, it soon became an expedition with a mission: to find the legendary Lovedu, a tribe ruled by a great rainmaking queen and dedicated to the "feminine” ideals of compromise, cooperation, tolerance, and peace.

Setting out from Tangier in a battered old blue-and-yellow Land Rover, Jones and Muggleton face daunting physical challenges, from shifting sand in the Sahara to deep mud wallows in Zaire. They encounter severe food shortages in Mali, military roadblocks in Nigeria, and corrupt border guards all over. In Mauritania they meet a young girl who offers to give Jones her baby sister. As they pass through the ever-changing face of Africa toward a meeting with the Queen of the Lovedu, Jones is perceptive, funny, moving, astute-everything a good travel writer should be. You'll feel you're right there beside her, meeting the people, marveling at the physical beauty of the land, sharing in the grand adventure.

Leseprobe
CHAPTER ONE

the mission

The Queen was an afterthought. Long before we heard of her, we hatched the scheme in Africa—in Zimbabwe, on the Zambezi, in a canoe. In the long white afternoon, the intensity of the sun propelled us, lightheaded, into a reedy little backwater to rest. We drew the four canoes together, and Dave, our guide, opened a cooler and pitched us bottles of warm Coke. I dipped my bandana in the river, wrapped it around my eyes, smarting from the glint of sun on water, and lay back against the thwart, half dozing, embraced by my friends’ banter. Images of the African morning played upon the inside of my eyelids: Elephants showering in the shallows at the river’s edge. Crocodiles lying like logs against the banks, innocent and sinister. A flight of carmine bee-eaters darting from their nests in the riverbank, flinging themselves like rubies over the bright water. Now, as heat enveloped us, pressing our bodies as a lover might, everything grew still as all that had gone before and all that was to come converged upon this single suspended moment that was both dream and reality: Africa.

Of course we couldn’t bear perfection. Who first pitched dream trips into the silence I can’t recall, but my companions leaped upon the subject, describing half a dozen places that might be better—more beautiful, more exciting, more perfect than this. It’s the subject that always comes up among travelers: Where do you really want to go? Someone spoke of Timbuktu: of camels and drifting coppery dunes, and blue-robed masked men slim as swords. Another spoke of rain forests along the Congo: of furtive okapis and tiny Pygmies hunting with nets, and women who make houses out of leaves. Someone spoke of the Skeleton Coast: of ships flung inland among desert elephants, and lions prowling among seals on the beach. And then a British voice was saying: “I’ve always been keen to drive all the way through Africa.”

This was Kevin Muggleton, a photographer from pastoral Wiltshire. He spoke offhandedly with an easy tantalizing laugh. Not even Muggleton could seriously make this proposition: to drive from one end of Africa to the other. But his voice carried a decidedly un-British edge of enthusiasm that drew me out of this moment—relaxed and contemplative in a green canoe on a blue river in the heart of Africa—and flung me by the sheer force of its vitality into an uncertain and adventurous future. “It’s classic,” Muggleton said. “You know, the old ‘Cape to Cairo’ sort of thing.” That’s all it took. Later I stumbled upon the Queen and used her as a good excuse, but in fact I decided everything in that moment.

When I was a kid, my father’s idea of a good time was to get in the car and drive somewhere. Anywhere. Anything to escape the malicious carping that passed for family life in our house. “Want to take a little ride in the jalopy, kiddo?” he’d say to me when tension sucked the air from our kitchen, and off we’d go in the old green Ford for a few hours or a few days. Even in winter we’d roll down the windows for a faceful of wind. We’d go where my father felt like going and head home when he was laughing again and felt like going back. Maybe he had a plan all along, but he never let on. To me and my dog, Lady, this aimless wandering was bliss. When I grew up I labeled it “travel” and kept at it, which is how I came to be lazing in a canoe on the Zambezi in the first place.

I lifted my bandana and squinted up at Muggleton in the next canoe. He was young, big, tall, lean. He’d grown up in Hong Kong, a military brat, gone to boarding school in England, and after Sandhurst done a stint as an officer in the British equivalent of the Green Berets. Later he’d started a video business in Victoria Falls, and once, for the hell of it, he’d walked through South America. If ever a man was qualified to go anywhere, Muggleton was it. He had the right attitude for the job too, perhaps because he was one of the last known male descendants of Prophet Muggleton, the seventeenth-century English sectarian who taught that “God takes no notice of us.” That dogma left the younger Muggleton self-reliant and endlessly amused by the human comedy, if also somewhat slack in his moral scruples.

"Me too,"I said.

Muggleton grinned.

"Great news," he said. And then he asked me: "Do you want to take a little ride?"

Everybody laughed. I laughed. I closed my eyes against the light and mulled it over. We’d been on the river for days—we being four American journalists; Diane, the travel executive who’d invited us on a press trip; Dave, the guide; and Muggleton. We’d run into Muggleton, an old friend of Diane’s, in Victoria Falls just after most of the journalists confessed to her that they’d significantly exaggerated their experience in canoeing. We were scheduled to leave for the Zambezi, a big river full of crocodiles and hippos, and Diane was desperate to bring her journalists back alive. She asked Muggleton to come along. He was a man who could paddle his own canoe.

That was supposed to give us an experienced paddler in the stern of each of our four canoes: Dave in the lead canoe, Muggleton, a journalist named George, and me. About George. He was young, like Muggleton. But that was all they had in common. George was a feature writer from a Midwestern daily, on his first trip to Africa—his first trip, I believe, outside the United States. He called Africa "The Dark Continent," intoning the phrase in a deep booming voice, pausing ever so…